1. Field
Subject matter disclosed herein relates to remapping memory devices.
2. Information
Memory devices are employed in many types of electronic devices, such as computers, cell phones, PDA's, data loggers, and navigational equipment, just to name a few examples. Among such electronic devices, various types of nonvolatile memory devices may be employed, such as NAND or NOR flash memories, SRAM, DRAM, and phase-change memory, just to name a few examples. In general, writing or programming processes may be used to store information in such memory devices, while a read process may be used to retrieve stored information.
Such nonvolatile memory devices may comprise memory cells that slowly deteriorate over time, leading to an increasing probability that a read and/or write error may occur upon accessing such a memory cell. Errors may also result from manufacture defects and/or marginal memory device construction, just to name a few examples. Accordingly, an error correction process may be employed to correct such errors as they occur. For example, an error correction coding (ECC) engine may be employed in a memory device in order to correct errors generated in the memory device. Typically, such an ECC engine may be limited in its ability to correct errors. If the number of errors increases beyond such a limit, such errors may become difficult or impossible to correct. Regions of a memory device that produce such a high number of errors may be subsequently avoided during read/write processes, for example. In such a case, spare regions of the memory device may then replace such error-prone memory regions. Accordingly, a memory address directed to an error-prone memory region may be remapped to a replacement memory region.